Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Saturday May 24, 2008 @04:26AM
from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusionexperiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."

Well, when you have these kinds of blatant typos it means the poster might not have any idea what he was talking about. In that case, it cast doubts on whether it's really a "world changing experiment"...

As a physicist, I am a little perplexed as to why a story with such signifigance would be published in an Italian economics journal. Why not Physical Review, Nature, or one of the other journals typically used for such groundbreaking work?

If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here [jst.go.jp] and here [jst.go.jp]. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then [google.co.uk], except for a very vague patent application to be found here [wipo.int].

It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...

More seriously, the established journals are often hideously slow in publishing stuff, and often dare to charge you for it, too. In the age of the Internet, all that can be dispensed with. You can get your discoveries and inventions published, peer reviewed, and communicated to the masses, all for free and without having to wait on some organization's release cycle.

You can also, of course, use the Internet to spread lies and misinformation, create fake peer reviews, and communicate all that to the masses, all for free and without having to wait on some organization's release cycle.

Cold fusion isn't ruled out by any known laws of physics, so I'll keep an open mind about it until it's proven one way or another. Pons and Fleischman may not have succeeded, but that's no reason to quit. As long as the people trying to make it work are doing so with their own funds, more power to them. If someone succeeds, then a lot of the scarcity in the world can be solved.

No, you don't get Nobels for publishing Japanese cold fusion work in Italian economics journals. You don't get them from publishing any cold fusion work in any peer reviewed physics journal because they don't get published as such, for much the same reasons that make people claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence even though the evidence was only absent in some of the replications. You do, however, publish articles about Japanese cold fusion work in an Italian economics journal when a Japanese company is building cold fusion equipment in an Italian factory purchased from Fiat, said company having hired Pons and Fleischmann as design consultants.

Neutron flux is a sign of some fusion reactions, but not all. 2 * (1p + 1n) --> (2p + 2n): two deuterium go to one helium. The energy released is from the conversion of mass of two deuterium (2 * 2.014 = 4.028) into one helium (4.002). The difference (.026) is is given off as energy measured in ergs, calculated from the amount of mass "lost" in grams times the speed of light in a vacuum in centimeters per second times itself. The source of the energy is the release of binding energy in the nuclei; the binding energy required grows at a lesser rate than the number of nucleons. This is the mass difference stated in another way. The energy is this particular reaction comes.

And if cold fusion were as much a hoax as those educated by hearsay rather than science would have you believe, then you wouldn't have symposia on the subject at scientific conferences hosted by the selfsame journals that refuse the publish such articles unless they're written so speculatively as to seem almost fiction, and the phenonemon examined is called something else.

Regardless of the barriers caused by pathological disbelief masquerading as skepticism, or worse, education at the hands of the pathological disbelievers, over 3,000 articles peer reviewed articles on cold fusion have been published. Enough evidence has been accumulated to convince both the US Many and the US Dept. of Energy that the phenonenon is real, though inadequately understood, and deserved more investigation and funding.

Those who are so certain that cold fusion is bogus would probably be glad to know that once the bogus cold fusion reactors built at the bogus Fiat plant are primed they crank out 270 kiloboguswatts over 90 bogusdays with no additional input of energy.

Answer for yourself: if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed? Through many different kinds of channels, a tiny bit at a time, which would by necessity mean some of the announcements would be of results and discoveries from some considerable time prior. The SETI people assert this is how alien contact and/or news of such would proceed and nobody blinks at that. Claim that this same process of being used on news of replicable tabletop physics and their eyes get stuck wide shut.

Maybe this experiment means that It actually happens. If this phenomenon is confirmed, it seems a good reason to change relevant wikipedia articles on the subject. You seem to think the contrary. It is not how science is supposed to work.

>a Japanese professor finds a way to get cold fusion to get work and the reactor[ITER] is obsolete before built!

A big MAYBE: first the cold fusion experiment must be investigated, reproduced, etc, AND it obsoletes ITER only if it can be harnessed to produce energy, which is far from certain..

Look about high temperature supraconductors: at a time they were all the rage, but currently in many (most?) setup, it's old fashioned 'cold' supraconductors which are used because of issues with the 'high temperatures' one (britleness, ability to withstand high current, etc.)

italian words for Hydrogen and Helium are Idrogeno and Elio. These translitteration comes from latin, where they didn't have an H phonema. The symbols H and He start with H because the name of the atoms are derived from greek where they did have H starting words.

It might come to a surprise to you, but not all words come from english; eventually it's the other way round.

That's all great and interesting and all, and the other posts on etymology are interesting too, but you see, the thing is, the Slashdot article summary is written in English, for a primarily English speaking audience. In English, the word begins with an "H".

I'm all for respecting the languages of others, but the English word is spelled "Helium". Or, do we now get to use the spelling and pronunciation rules of whatever language we choose?

...or any other target language, you should at least try to do a proper and complete job of it, not a half-assed job, else you risk presenting yourself as only partially literate and perhaps less than knowledgeable about whatever it is that you're trying to write.

sir, they have considered using electricity to make fusion, through magnetic containment. Why they haven't tried to use an electricity... well they have! It's called a Fusor, and it was invented in 1930s, and is considered a cheap, viable neutron generator. sadly, it doesn't scale well to producing electricity.